Everyone Speaks Nutella

From the far corners of YouTube, we bring you this “scientific examination of a question that plagues many Germans and French alike.” The question, of course, is why the French and German versions of Nutella are so different: The French is thin enough to pour; the German is thick enough to mortar bricks. The highly amusing short film was posted by Karambolage, a weekly French-German television show, and it hypothesizes that the different Nutellas are the product of different national bread styles. The thick German Nutella would tear apart softer French breads. (Of course, the thin French version would still be fine on dense German bread, so the question of which came first is never answered. But you weren’t really wondering anyway.)

The video also exposes you to the terrifying world of other Nutella-related YouTube content: I am here to reassure you that, yes, there is indeed a video of someone’s cats dipping their paws into a Nutella jar and then licking off the tasty spread. In fact, it turns out that the Interwebs is a black hole of Nutella obsession.

When MetaFilter linked to the Karambolage Nutella video, the list of comments spiraled into ever more over-the-top Nutella products: A Nutella latte (“You don’t consume it; it consumes you”); Nutella on HobNobs (“basically the speedball of the addictive snack world”); and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups dipped in Nutella (“Some people might want to follow them with an insulin chaser”). And if you post a Nutella question on Chowhound, you’ll be getting replies years later: One request for Nutella recipes has garnered 67 responses. My favorite post is the one that begins, “WARNING—this is not a gourmet recipe!”